“Plaster”
by David Szalay
from the December 9, 2024 issue of The New Yorker
This week we get a story from David Szalay, an author I have heard so much about but have never read. He’s been on many up-and-coming-writer lists, and his 2016 collection of linked stories, All That Man Is, won the Gordon Burn Prize and was on the Booker Prize shortlist.
Here is how “Plaster” begins:
There’s some sort of holdup. Every day, they expect to fly out, and every day they are told it will be “another twenty-four hours.” They’re staying in a hotel with swimming pool.
It’s not really hot enough for swimming. It’s not quite pool weather. It’s, like, seventy-five or something. Still, they spend most of the day poolside — there isn’t anything else to do.
I’m posting this late because it’s been a very busy month so far, but I hope you’re all having a great final month of 2024. And I hope you’ll share any thoughts you have on this story below.
I just reread the Carver story “What we talk about when we talk about love” ; in reading “Plaster,” I am once again astonished at the inadequacy of language to describe the strength of feeling or even of experience. It’s all we have, but it’s not enough. And yet brilliant authors like Raymond Carver or David Szalay make it enough, make us understand without explicit description what cannot be defined or described, but what we know is true. This story and the two in the immediately prior issues have been brilliant. Thanks Deborah Triesman and Willing Davidson.
My immediate gut reaction to David Szalay’s short story is languor. As in “the state or feeling, often pleasant, of tiredness or inertia.” This seems sort of the perfect short story for how someone can so easily slip into a very bad case of incipient life languor, though this one seems unpleasant, all the moreso for not knowing why.
Sort of like slipping into the sauna and not ever getting out for 10 years or laying down on the beach in southern California and not getting up for 10 years. The nautical equivalent would be stuck out in the middle of the ocean with no wind. The boat swaying back and forth on the swells but not moving at all.
The most telling part of this story is when the protagonist, Istvan, “takes the pen with is left hand, and then turns to the doctor with a look that says, ‘What am I supposed to do?'”
The whole tone of this story is so perfectly unattached, remote, removed and totally unfocused. And the irony is when Istvan meets his double or doppelganger in the end that shows the contrast.
This is kind of indirectly an antiwar story. And there isn’t any really huge cause and effect but something that sometimes happens, that happened in between going in and getting out of the military.
It’s a little like T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” His mother seems have spotted it. “I know your friend was killed,” she says, putting the sour cream back in the fridge. Istvan doesn’t want to talk about it. He’s sort of just getting by.
And the impact of it all that he doesn’t really understand, only possibly lands on him when slams his right hand into the door. The plaster is a makeshift, once the inflammation lessens but more precisely it’s kind of a psychic injury that plaster’s not that much good for healing.
A different sort of short story well-written.